Nokia 7 Plus Complete Review & Specs

Nokia, whose return to the market can be considered successful, presented five smartphones at MWC 2018, and Nokia 7 Plus among them deserves the most attention. This device with a memorable design, balanced characteristics and, importantly, an adequate price – the manufacturer’s recommended price of the updated seven is 399 euros. We have prepared a review of Nokia 7 Plus and are ready to talk about all the advantages and disadvantages of this smartphone.

Equipments

In addition to the smartphone itself, you can find a protective case (but not all stores will sell the phone with it), a charger (USB Type C), instruction manual, USB cable and a clip to open the slot where the SIM cards are stored.

Design and Ergonomics

Nokia 7 Plus – a large phone, made in a monolithic aluminum body covered with six layers of paint, through which the manufacturer tried to disguise the metal for ceramics. The smartphone looks impressive, the contrast created by the white body and the copper-edged rims of the camera, the fingerprint scanner and edging of faces that have been double anodized make it visually much more expensive than the Nokia 7 Plus actually costs.

Despite the 6-inch display diagonal, the 7 Plus has a width of only 75 mm and a thickness of 7.99 mm – one cannot use it comfortably with one hand, but you can not even call a smartphone shovel. In the male hand, the body lies well, does not slip even without the use of a protective cover.

On the bottom of the smartphone are a USB Type-C port, a multimedia speaker hole, and a talking microphone.

Top – 3.5 mm jack for headphones. I am glad that Nokia remains in the already few cohorts of leading manufacturers, who do not give up the mini-game under the pretext of far-fetched innovations.

On the right are the keys for adjusting the volume and turning on the smartphone, the stroke for both is smooth and clear.

On the left – a combined tray for two SIM-cards, sacrificing one of which you can increase the permanent memory of the smartphone with a MicroSD card up to 256 gigabytes.

On the back of the body is a lens block of the main camera, below it is a fingerprint scanner. The work of the last no complaints, it works instantly, errors in the reading are not noticed.

The smartphone did not receive a moisture protection, this is its drawbacks on the part of the design end – the gadget is perfectly assembled and looks cool, perhaps, by design it is one of the most beautiful models released this year.

Display

Nokia 7 Plus – the first smartphone of the Finnish-Chinese brand with a display format 18: 9. The screen based on the IPS matrix has a diagonal of 6 inches, a resolution of 2160×1080 pixels and a pixel density of 403 PPI. The display is covered with Gorilla Glass 3 glass with a 2.5D rounding effect.

In all respects, the display of the seven is good – the color inversion does not change when the viewing angles are changed, the color gamma is correct, in a frontal comparison with the One Plus 5T, where the OLED matrix is installed, Nokia loses the saturation and depth of black, but if you are a fan of the accurate color reproduction of IPS displays – 7 Plus you will not be disappointed. Under a bright sunny sun, there are no problems with the readability of the text, the maximum brightness margin here is quite high (500 nits).

Interface

Starting in 2018, HMD Global, responsible for smartphones under the Nokia brand, announced the launch of cooperation with Google within the Android One program. From now on, all new models of the company will be released under the control of the “clean” version of the operating system, and Google issues directly security patches and updates. Nor was the exception of Nokia 7 Plus. The smartphone is Android 8.0 Oreo without any additions from the manufacturer, except for the camera application.

Overweight with unnecessary elements, speed, and stability – these are the qualities for which fans love non-modifiable Android. Almost all of this owner of Nokia 7 Plus get full. The first is, of course, the interface of the system. He, in this case, is exactly what the creators intended him to do. A minimum of decorations, clear lines, and laconic elements. Against the background of most modern smartphones, a very small number of preinstalled applications immediately attracts attention. These included only the most necessary programs that provide basic functions of the smartphone. Above this “out of the box” we get only a small set of applications and services from Google like maps or Play Movies.

If there were no questions about the “cleanliness” of the interface, then there was a small hitch with the expected responsiveness and smoothness of the work. While the overall performance of the gadget is very high, there are also noticeable small lags when working with the shell. The device can think for a split second when entering the settings or be starting the camera. Explain this behavior can only be a flaw in optimizing the current firmware version. Probably, this will be fixed in the next updates. With the stability of the work, no problems arose. In the course of testing, the smartphone never hovered. There were no flights of individual applications.

There are Android One and features that can not be fixed by patches. The back side of simplicity and laconism are rather modest customization possibilities. For those who prefer to just turn on the device and start using, this will only be another plus. However, those who are accustomed to a lot of additional features in third-party firmware should be prepared for the fact that the standard set of settings includes only the most necessary items. So, for example, even changing the order of the navigation keys, in this case, is not provided.

Camera

The Zeiss logo is shown on the protective glass of the camera. Although small, it immediately attracts attention. It serves as a kind of quality mark, which became famous for smartphones with the Symbian operating system. The resumption of cooperation between brands was appreciated by the fans. The camera, according to the best traditions of 2018, is double. It uses the main module with a resolution of 12 megapixels, aperture f / 1.75-pixel size 1.4 microns. In addition to it goes another lens at 13 megapixels, it is intended for the Bokeh effect and a double zoom. Its light speed is an order of magnitude worse – just f / 2.6.

The manufacturer did not change the interface of the standard camera application but finalized its algorithms, which gave positive results. Pictures are obtained qualitatively under almost any conditions. Day photos feature excellent detailing, a wide dynamic range, as well as natural color rendering. In difficult conditions helps the mode HDR, which aligns the color rendition and highlights the details in the shade. In the automatic mode, the camera algorithms determine when to turn on the HDR, but sometimes you have to turn it on manually.

In the rooms, the situation is no worse – even with poor artificial lighting, the photos turn out to be very detailed. At night shooting, a good light-intensity of the main module helps, thanks to which there are noises, but at least. And with the manual shooting mode, you can maximize the possibilities from the camera of the device. Nokia 7 Plus camera review showed that the portrait mode does not work perfectly yet. Often, algorithms are wrong with the definition of the boundaries of the object, because of which it is partially blurred. In general, the picture looks decent, but if you look closely, it becomes noticeable partial blurring of the subject itself.

The double zoom operates without loss of quality.

Without increasingDouble Zoom

Flash perfectly helps in night photography, gently highlighting objects in the frame and improving their detail.

Without flashWith flash

Bothie is the original mode, which is in the camera application. Its feature is that you can simultaneously get a picture of the main and front camera Nokia 7 Plus. This way you can get a vivid photo or video.

Supports shooting video in 4K with 30 fps. Among the available formats is FullHD, but unfortunately again, only at 30 frames per second. The OZO Audio technology in combination with 3 microphones of noise reduction allows recording directional and surround sound.

Performance

At the heart of the Nokia 7 Plus is the Snapdragon 660 processor, it’s an eight-core chipset running at a clock speed of 1.8-2.2 GHz, performed on a 14-nm process technology. The smartphone comes in one modification with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of permanent memory. Declared support for microSD cards up to 256 GB.

Thanks to the fresh processor and pure Android interface, the smartphone feels super-fast, there are no annoying minor jerking here either in the interface or in multitasking mode. According to the impressions from the use of Nokia 7 Plus, it can be compared with the more expensive OnePlus 5T on Snapdragon 835.

In the AnTuTu test, the seven see score collects on average 140,000 points, in GeekBench – 1636 in single-core mode and 5902 points in multicore.

On the back of the smartphone you can find the inscription Android One, which means that under the program of the same name, the device will receive updates to the operating system and security services for the next three years.

Processor and video processor

The Nokia 7 Plus has an eight-core chipset Snapdragon660. Given that this smartphone is a representative of the average price segment (its price is 400 euros), this is very good. The smartphone has 4 GB of RAM, and therefore in combination with the processor, it copes well with multitasking. The video adapter Adreno 512 is responsible for graphics processing.

Some characteristics you will not be full-you need to check the phone in action. In the application, Antutu Nokia 7 Plus collects about 140 thousand “parrots” (points), which is quite a lot. This phone is very different from its counterparts at a price in terms of performance. You can be sure that for a long time the monitored smartphone will support all modern applications for Android.

Memory

The memory capacity in the smartphone is standard. It is 64 GB. In 2018, this may seem to someone a little, but you should not get upset, because the phone supports memory cards up to 256 GB in volume. Considering the fact that today many people use cloud storage, the memory of Nokia 7 Plus should not be the decisive factor influencing the opinion of the device.

Software

The smartphone runs on the new Android Oreo. This, according to the representatives of this OS, is the most secure operating system at the moment. It is good that it has a simple shell without any bells and whistles. In many phones (Meizu, Xiaomi) has its own shell on top of Android. This, of course, is beautiful, but it takes up a lot of RAM, why the phones start to slow down.

Android Oreo has a simplified shell and only necessary services, which means that this operating system does not affect the performance of smartphones. The OS has many interesting features:

A picture in Picture: you can watch videos and use other services at the same time (about what we already wrote in the “Screen” section);

Advanced notification settings: for each notification, you can put a separate sound;

automatic filling of accounts in browsers and programs (both on computers) and much more.

According to representatives of Android, their new operating system has become twice as fast.

Sound

The sound in the smartphone is not bad. In the case, there is one speaker with an amplifier and a standard 3.5 mm jack for headphones. It is noteworthy that the smartphone has as many as three microphones. As the representatives of Nokia say, it is able to record sound with maximum accuracy, which means that for some people Nokia 7 Plus can replace an inexpensive voice recorder.

Wireless Communications

A full review of the smartphone Nokia 7 Plus is able to work with two NanoSIM, instead of one of which you can put MicroSD up to 256 GB. On the case, there are three noise-canceling microphones, thanks to which the interlocutor hears you well even in a noisy environment. In the rest everything is standard – the model feels confident in LTE-networks, and also supports Wi-Fi 802.11ac. The big advantage is the presence of an NFC chip, with which you can pay in stores, without carrying a wallet. GPS and GLONASS resources are used for navigation on the terrain.

One speaker with an intelligent amplifier; Three microphones with Nokia OZO Audio support;

BATTERY:

Built-in battery 3800 mAh;

OPERATING SYSTEM:

Android Oreo;

Autonomy

Nokia 7 Plus has a battery for 3800 mAh, taking into account the energy-efficient processor of this volume is more than enough for decent autonomy. For a short time to get acquainted with the smartphone, I was not able to fully verify this, but by analogy with other gadgets with an FHD display on the 660-snap, you should expect two days of work from one battery charge or a full day with a hard load. Given the availability of fast charging – excellent.

“Clean” interface and regular software updates within the Android One program

Minuses:

Performance below the flagship

The choice between installing a second SIM card and expanding the memory

No water and dust protection

Conclusion

Nokia 7 Plus became the best smartphone manufacturer after rebirth because it offers an excellent camera, autonomy, screen and good performance, which is enough even in demanding games. Along with these, we get a generous amount of memory and the possibility of expanding the volume with a MicroSD card. In his new smartphone, Nokia managed to avoid serious mistakes. It pleases everything from the build quality and the materials of the case and ending with the shell of Android One. The only thing is that for this price you can find an option with a more powerful processor, so if the main thing for you is games, then it’s better to pay attention to the devices on Snapdragon 835.

The Review

nokia 7 plus

Review Breakdown

Syed Arslan is a senior review and News writer at 1review2day, focusing on upcoming smart devices. He previously worked for Fortune Magazine, and he has 3 years of experience. He loves testing out new gadgets and complaining about them. He is the ghost of all failed Kickstarters. Email at syedarslan@1review2day.comRead more...